As already mentioned in my first blog, an increasing number of means now exist for putting out messages to selected (and especially self-selected) audiences. We already make our press releases and other material available via RSS feeds, as well as via the website. A comparatively recent innovation, which seems well suited for some of these purposes, is twitter. For those not already in the twitterverse, twitter allows brief 140-character ‘tweets’ (posts) that can be viewed by those who have chosen (signed up) to do so. BBSRC is @BBSRC and I am @dbkell. In its simplest form, the ramblings of other tweeters are seen by any tweeter only if they have signed up to follow them, so twittering can involve more of a fractured monologue than a dialogue. It does however allow all recipients to see the discourse ‘instantaneously’ and thereby capture the zeitgeist (for literature citations this has been called the citegeist…), possibly assisting the generation of the supposed Wisdom of Crowds (and at least access to one’s readership).

The discourse that is science has both formal and informal mechanisms. Probably the most formal is the classical peer review process, and while this is probably the least worst system we have evolved to date, and it has an interesting history, it is well recognised to be far from perfect. Twittering is arguably towards the informal end of the spectrum (in that peer review prior to publication of a thought is largely non-existent, albeit organisation such as arxiv.org have used this model very effectively). In between – and maybe pointing towards the future – are collaborative document tagging systems such as that described by Beel and Gipp from the Scienstein organisation that would allow the community to annotate published work in a manner more detailed than the simple tags represented by a folksonomy. This bears on the question of the persistence of material (once) accessible via the internet. While the internet archive’s WayBack machine is a useful time machine for some of the internet since 1996, many URLs describing bioinformatics resources relevant to MEDLINE have a tendency to disappear, partly due to lack of resources for their maintenance (an issue we seek to address via our BBR funding stream).

Finally, the Tao Te Ching had an interesting take on persistence, although its author was not necessarily thinking about commentaries on the published literature: “Work is done then forgotten; therefore it lasts forever”.

Twitter has so many potential (and current) uses in science, it is hard to list them all. As an educational technologist (with a PhD in molecular virology) working in biological science at Leicester University, I am part of a group of scientists, bloggers and educational technologists who use twitter as our tea room. Many institutions have lost their physical tea rooms, but twitter goes one better by offering the chance to keep in touch informally with colleagues all over the world. At conferences, we use hash tags (#) to share our experiences and meet up virtually or physically. We share blog posts (using an automated tweet generator when your posts are published is the easiest way: twitterfeed.com is useful), we use @wefollow and follow Fridays to find new people to follow, scan twitter by RSS search terms for other scientists using technical terms we know will interest us. There is banter and ‘noise’ and chat about coffee and tea, but this builds friendships and when you ask your tweeps a question, you can get answers in minutes.
I’m @jobadge – chat to you on twitter!